Reconnection-powered fast radio transients from coalescing neutron star binaries
- Creators
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Most, Elias R.
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Philippov, Alexander A.
Abstract
It is an open question whether and how gravitational wave events involving neutron stars can be preceded by electromagnetic counterparts. This work shows that the collision of two neutron stars with magnetic fields well below magnetar-level strengths can produce millisecond Fast-Radio-Burst-like transients. Using global force-free electrodynamics simulations, we demonstrate that electromagnetic flares, produced by overtwisted common flux tubes in the binary magnetosphere, collide with the orbital current sheet and compress it, resulting in enhanced magnetic reconnection. As a result, the current sheet fragments into a sequence of plasmoids, which collide with each other leading to the emission of coherent electromagnetic waves. The resulting millisecond-long burst of radiation should have frequencies in the range of f 10 − 20 GHz for magnetic fields of B^∗ = 10¹¹ G at the stellar surfaces.
Additional Information
The authors are grateful for discussions with K. Cleary, G. Hallinan, M. Lyutikov, B. Metzger, K. Mooley, J. Stone and E. Quataert. ERM gratefully acknowledges support from a joint fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, the Princeton Gravity Initiative and the Institute for Advanced Study. The simulations were performed on the NSF Frontera supercomputer under grants AST20008 and AST21006. AP acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1909458. This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611. ERM also acknowledges the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) (Towns et al. 2014) through Expanse at SDSC and Bridges-2 at PSC through allocations PHY210053 and PHY210074. ERM further acknowledges the use of computational resources managed and supported by Princeton Research Computing, a consortium of groups including the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) and the Office of Information Technology's High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University. ERM also acknowledges the use of high-performance computing at the Institute for Advanced Study. This work has made extensive use of a number of software packages. Software: AMReX (Zhang et al. 2019), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), numpy (Harris et al. 2020), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020)Attached Files
Accepted Version - 2207.14435v1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 121202
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20230501-296902000.15
- Princeton University
- Institute for Advanced Study
- AST-20008
- NSF
- AST-21006
- NSF
- AST-1909458
- NSF
- PHY-1607611
- NSF
- PHY-210053
- NSF
- PHY-210074
- NSF
- Created
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2023-05-02Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-05-02Created from EPrint's last_modified field